A Song of Ice and Fireflowers
by theseeker64
Summary: A mysterious ailment is befalling the world, a corruptive, insidious, sickness called 'hollowing'. Now the last vestige of hope for civilization and life to continue on is a motley group of humans and anthropomorphs, helmed by the fearless Mario, and sent on a quest to the strange and desolate land known only as Drangleic.


The tide heaved against the ship's hull, the sails caught wind and snapped crisply in the morning air with emphatic alacrity, and the bow of the ship burrowed a trench into the vast stretch of lapis waters, slicing across the crest of a rising ridge of whitecaps and barreling forth toward the faint and distant rise of wind-blasted rocks and spires and bastions creeping up out of the horizon.

At the ship's bow, Mario pulled a drag off his cigarette and watched their destination swell up from the iridescent fogs. He grit his teeth and allowed smoke to trail from between them so that it snaked up around his nose, clawing tendrils and plumes up between his eyes and the great sprawl of the sea. On the foremast at his flank, a gull came to perch and gaze alongside him. Mario turned his eyes on the affable avian, only a speck of dirty white superimposed against the pale sky canvased overhead, and puffed on his cigarette. After awhile, the bird took flight once more, spreading its wings and swooping off back towards the path behind the ship, and Mario wondered if even the gulls feared the place they were headed.

Thoughts like those were ill omen for a voyaging man in unfamiliar lands however, and so Mario was quick to cast them aside. He leaned forth to rest his forearms against the lacquered oak that ran the deck's perimeter. The ocean smelled of salt and came spraying warmly across his cheek with every lurch over every tide. The sun's golden kiss was just rising off the eastern seas, and the lands awaiting them north grew and grew as the light clawed near to them and the boat beat on for them. Mario smoked and watched.

A figure came to rest beside him after a short while, and Mario turned to see his brother Luigi offer a meek smile of welcome. Mario returned it, but neither of them managed to conjure any mirth to fill the gesture. They were simply affectations: muscular reflexes from a bygone era that had once been almost necessary but now where utterly phony, and decidedly hollow.

His brother's eyes were rimmed with dark circles, the thin line of greying hair beneath his bulbous nose unkempt, the crow's feet at his eyes blossoming wider, Mario thought, than he'd ever seen them. Luigi looked towards the sea, however, and there was something in his eyes, some intrepidness, that managed to stir the small pot of warmth left in the pit of Mario's stomach he called 'hope'.

"We'll be there before high noon," Luigi said; his voice a raspy and haggard thing that came tunneling up from the gravel of his throat.

Mario's eyes drifted back to the coming horizon. "Yes." He dragged his cigarette.

Luigi sighed, his shoulders slumping and stealing that intrepidness from his posture entirely as he shook his head. He was quiet a while, and only the lapping tides drumming against the ship's hull filled the silence between the two brothers until Luigi broke it by asking, "Do you believe in God, Mario?"

Mario watched the smoke trickle from his lips. It started as a wide plume of semiopaque grey before trailing towards the skies and winds and world and dissipating into nothing. He shrugged. "Maybe once," he admitted, "but that was a long time ago, brother."

Luigi nodded. He spoke without prying his eyes from the water. "They say demons roam the lands we're heading for."

"That they do." Mario swept his eyes across the lush mane of greens and browns that were starting to take definition atop the land. He wondered how many dark things that would stop at nothing to kill them lurked in the shadows of the canopy and the crevices, biding their time, waiting to strike.

Another long gap of silence pooled between them until Luigi said, "I'm afraid, Mario."

Mario nodded. "So am I, brother. So am I."

Together, they faced the horizon as dawn's incipient light lurched for its apex over the coming lands.

* * *

Below deck, treading beneath the dim and dappled lighting seeping through the hulls' reinforced latticework, Princess Zelda carried a bucket of leeches and a warm cloth past the barred cells that made up the ship's brig. Their sole prisoner scurried to his cell door at the sound of her footsteps and pressed his ugly face against the iron till the flesh oozed out around it in a vile display. Zelda grimaced and gave the cell a wide berth, keep a vigilant eye on the dirty hands that wrapped the iron on either side of the bubbling flesh. Faintly, she could smell the odious scent of the man's fecal matter and urine rotting inside.

A dry cackle chased after her from within the cell. "_You__'__re going to die, Princess,__" _the prisoner hissed, bathed in the shadows, his beak of a nose protruding out over the bars like a plank. "_You__'__re all going to die. Soon. So soon.__" _The laughter came again, sardonic and strident.

_Not as soon as you, Ganondorf, _she considered retorting, but thought better of it; the man was not worth her words. She hurried past.

The room where they were keeping the dying man was wedged into a nook at the very end of the hall, where the ship's stern tapered to a point. Zelda pressed the door back on its rusted hinged softly so as not to startle his sleep. She slipped out of her shoes and padded barefoot to the sprawl of hay clustered up against the hull.

Atop it, beneath a heavy woolen blanket Zelda could only hope wasn't infested with fleas or disease, Link lay with his eyes closed. His breathing came in irregular patterns, as it had interminably been the last few weeks, but he appeared to be resting all the same. Zelda lowered to her knees, wrung out her damp cloth into a pail, and dabbed the warmth at Link's brow and cheeks and neck. He did not stir. She leaned near and kissed him on the bridge of his nose. His skin was fire against her lips.

"_Link_," she called softly, hating to wake him but knowing it necessary all the same. No man could sleep through a leeching, and she wasn't intending on waking him with _that _unpleasant bit of business. "_Link, wake up._"

His eyelids twitched, fluttered, opened. His eyes—still an absolutely striking shade of blue even in his sickness—fell to hers and, slowly, recognition stirred within. Zelda forced a smile. Link either could not or simply did not return it. Instead, he swallowed and licked at his lips. Zelda fetched the last of their drinking water from a pail at the edge of the hay and brought it carefully to his lips. He drank but nearly choked after only a few swallows, and so Zelda took it from him, dabbed at his chin with the hem of her skirt, and stroked his hair back from his brow.

"We're almost there," she told him. "Do you hear me, Link? We're almost there."

His response was a throaty groan. His eyelids fell once more.

"Link… you have to be leeched again."

He winced, grimaced, moved his head in a feeble gesture that, perhaps, might have been protest if he still had strength to do so.

"You have to," she insisted. "It's the only way to remove the darkness that seeks to steal you from me."

Slowly, the grimace faded from his visage, and only the still and sick countenance of her dying love remained. Zelda took it as acceptance. She reached for his tunic, pried it apart down the seam to reveal his bare chest, and lowered her hand into the bucket of leeches beside her knees to grip one of the slimy things and begin the long and arduous process of covering Link in them entirely.

By the end of the treatment, she hoped, his life would be extended… if only for a little while.

* * *

"They're following us." Falco Lombardi lowered the bronze spyglass from his eye and ground the straw protruding from the corner of his beak into dust.

Fox McCloud took the spyglass, angled it out over the stern, and peered into the endless nothing the ship left in its relentless trail. "I don't see anything."

"You're not a _bird_, Fox," Falco informed him. "You don't have my gift of sight. If we needed to _smell _the assassins, I'm sure we'd be relying on your own skills."

"Ah, not a bird… explains why every time I try flying, I wind up on my ass." In the silence that followed his joke, he could practically hear his friend's reproachful glare. Fox lowered the spyglass and turned a sly grin on Falco before he could voice said-reproach. "Relax, Falco. It's a joke. I believe you." He looked back to the sea. "As to whether they're 'assassins' or not… is still up for debate, of course."

Falco's austere posture leaned into the deck's railing, his eyes bore fervently into the horizon. "There is a plump one in yellow and a tall one in purple. Their ship is small. There may be more below deck."

Fox mulled it over. "Well, there are always ways to deal with… 'unwanted company'." He reached for his blaster, hooked a finger around the trigger, and flipped the weapon up into his free hand, catching it and firing a shot into the waters below the stern. The laser bit into a wave that responded with a small splash but looked otherwise unimpressed by the attack. Fox grinned. "I'm not worried."

Falco sighed. "If a true threat does not lie behind us…" He faced the bow. "Then one certainly lies before us."

"Maybe," Fox admitted, hopping up to sit on the deck railing and twirling his gun from hand to hand. "And maybe even below our own deck."

Falco raised a brow. "The prisoner?"

"Maybe… or others."

"Others?"

Fox hurled his blaster extra high and watched it silhouette against the afternoon sky, where it hung suspended, twirling free and careless. When gravity got the best of it, he caught the weapon and angled its nozzle from point to point atop the ship deck. "I don't trust 'em, old buddy. Not one of 'em. The pink thing that eats everything in sight… the woman with the fancy metal suit… those bizarre eskimo siblings… the _monkey_… I wouldn't put my life in not one of their hands."

"A rationale decision," Falco admitted. "But paranoia and skepticism are not luxuries we are afforded any longer, Fox. We need allies in this new world on the horizon."

"I didn't say we wouldn't be allies," Fox explained, "I said I don't trust 'em."

"A group founded on trust is stronger than one teetering on the verge of collapse from paranoia," Falco retorted.

Fox shrugged. "A strong group… sounds like another 'luxury' we can't afford. Not these days. Not with the end so near in sight."

"Yes… 'the end'." Falco heaved another of his sighs that seemed to carry the burden of all the world's struggles within. "I suppose it won't be long now."

"No," Fox agreed. "Not long at all."

Falco's eyes narrowed across the deck above the curvature of his beak. "Speaking of 'allies'…"

Fox looked. Their fearless 'leader' and captain of the ship, Mario, was ascending the short fall of stairs to the dais at the stern. The human was aging, and it showed. Beneath his vibrant red cap, the mop of dark hair was dappled with grays, and when the man walked, it was with the slow pace of one whose legs had put in much mileage over the years. He moved before the two of them and fixed each with a wan smile and nod.

"Mario," Falco returned the greeting.

Fox kept quiet. His fingers drummed against the butt of his blaster.

"We're nearly there," Mario said.

"So we are," Fox answered. "You don't need aquiline eyes like my blue-feathered friend here to see that."

Mario ignored him. "Prepare."

"For?"

Mario's eyes moved to his and narrowed. "For anything." And with that, the man turned, sauntered off, and disappeared down the ladder leading to the brig and lower deck.

Fox shared a look of consternation with Falco before holstering his blaster and leaping up to balance precariously atop the deck railing for a better view forward. Past the sails snapping hungrily at the afternoon air, and beyond the curved line of the bow cutting its way across the ocean carpet, the lands men called 'Drangleic' had swollen on the horizon to full size.

"Falco, old buddy," Fox called down to his friend, his heart fluttering, his blood heating with the thrill of adventure and the buzz of glimpsing uncharted lands for the first time in a long time, "…we've arrived."


End file.
